


You Think She's an Open Book (but you don't know which page to turn to)

by spuffyduds



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-05
Updated: 2009-12-05
Packaged: 2017-10-04 04:59:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spuffyduds/pseuds/spuffyduds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You think you know people.  You never do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Think She's an Open Book (but you don't know which page to turn to)

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-Not Fade Away, with flashbacks to Pylea and other parts of Angel: the Series; works with comics canon, but all you have to know of the comics is: In the final battle that ended Not Fade Away, L.A. got sucked into Hell. Lorne is benevolently overlording a portion of the city. Other than that, there are a couple of spoilers for who survived, or sort of did, according to comics canon.
> 
> The rape scene is non-explicit.

_L.A., post-descent_

 

Well, of _course_ there's bureaucracy in Hell.

Lorne doesn't usually get pulled into dealing with the small stuff, though. He's all about the sweeping proclamations: Feed everybody! Clothe everybody, preferably in something sparkly! No, in my fiefdom, we don't _care_ who has sex with who! Or what has sex with what! Just not in the _street_, cupcake, okay?

Letting the eager underlings take care of the details has usually worked out pretty well, but now, for some reason, Brandon's called him and is trying to get him tangled up in the nittiest of gritties: meeting a recently sucked-in group of other-dimensioners. There are two or three of these a day, popping up at several spots everybody calls suck-points. Some demon-y, some humanoid, some of the giant arachnid variety. Mostly bewildered and frightened, sometimes angry and violent, and occasionally stunned by the concept of shrimp. (And once in a while there's a serious air-pressure difference from their home dimension, and the newbies only look bewildered or angry for a fraction of a second before they explode. _That's_ demoralizing for the welcome team.)

*************************************************************

 

_Hyperion Hotel, shortly after rescue from Pylea_

Fred's painting over the crazy. First coat the crazy still peeks through, so she's gonna do another and another, _wallpaper_ over the crazy if she has to. Over the formulas that don't make any sense. (The ones that maybe _would_ make sense if she thought about them more, she writes down on her arm when nobody's looking. No need to throw the… bathwater… never mind.)

She paints over the stick figures of the fairy-tale her and the fairy-tale Angel on the horse, giggles at herself when she notices that she actually put _crowns_ on one set of them. Geez. She stops giggling when she notices that in one dark corner, low down, she drew herself and then someone much smaller. Because that was the worst part of the crazy, that _never happened_, that would mean that she'd…left…

There's no way she was _there_ long enough for all that she halfway remembers to have really happened, anyway.

_Should other dimensions exist, and they almost certainly DO, there's no reason whatsoever that time should run concurrently there_, one of her professors says in her head.

"Shut up shut UP," Fred says, and Angel looks over at her from the wall he's painting, with his brow even—browier than usual.

"Talking to my stomach," Fred says, and he blinks. "It's really _growly_," she says, and he smiles, says, "Tomasita's 24-Hour Taco Stand?"

"You read my _mind_," Fred says. He sticks out an arm all gracious and she takes it, and that tiny stick figure thing never happened _never happened_.

**************************************************************************

 

"I need to deal with this particular bunch _why_?" Lorne says into his cell, and how sad is it that his reception is _better_ in Hell? Five bars, twenty-four-seven.

"Um. You might, um, know them?"

"And you say this because…?"

"They're, they have, a lot of similarities. To you."

Lorne considers banging his head on the nearest wall, but he's already way over the recommended lifetime limit on concussions. "Brandon. Sweetheart," he says. "Let's go over this one more time. If an accurate description of, say, a being's skin color, scales or lack thereof, horns, claws et cetera et cetera can tell us whether this being is about to _eat_ us or not, said accurate physical description is _not racist_."

"Right right. Uh, green, yeah. With horns. Some of them have swords. They're not—I mean, I know _you're_ not, but I gather you're a little different…they're not _dangerous_, are they?"

"Just don't let any of them _dance_," Lorne says. "Be right there."

***********************************************************************************

_Six Pylean months before rescue_

Fred tries, sometimes, to figure out how old Genny is. But she can't figure out any sort of time-conversion that takes two suns into account—what does that do to the years? Nursing seems like a long time ago, and she'd guess from Genny's height that she's maybe six but then again she's not exactly human, so who knows?

And then one day Genny's playing on the floor of the stables, shooting pebbles with a little catapult Fred made out of sticks, when Fred's master walks in and settles the age question once and for all. "Big enough to sell as a house-slave now," he says, and—just _grabs_ Genny. So suddenly, just _takes_ her, Fred doesn't have a second to come up with a plan, reach for her, look at her little monster face one more time. He yanks her up, and Genny's kicking and screaming—good girl, brave little monster—but he holds her out at arm's length like she doesn't weigh anything, walks out of the stables, and when Fred snaps out of the shock and starts running after him a couple of the other slaves tackle her, take her down, tell her, "It always happens, you knew it would happen, best thing for her, house is better than the stables, do you want him to zap your collar? Do you want him to zap _her_ collar?"

She goes limp under them, because, no, she can't watch Genny get collar-zapped, not again.

She tries to hope over the next few days that it won't work out, that they'll change their minds before the next market day, decide that Genny's not old enough or smart enough. _Pretend you're dumb, honey_, she thinks at Genny, hard.

But market day comes, and Genny's on the cart going out—silent, looking at Fred as they go by—and she's _not_ on the cart when the Master drives it back into the courtyard. There's a big barrel of liquor, though.

He got a good price, Fred thinks, and then she tries to claw his eyes out.

There's a whipping-post, and jail. Fred's surprised, disappointed that they didn't just kill her, and then it seems like that's not gonna make much difference because the whip-cuts get infected, _good_.

The lines throb on her back. She can feel each separate one, like she's leaning against an electric fence, like she's lying on a jellyfish, its stinging strands spread out to cradle her. _Nice_ jellyfish. "Gulf of Mexxxxxxico," she says out loud, into the moldy quiet of her cell. "Portuguese man'o'wars _everywhere_. Throb throb throb." And she's really losing it, she's not making any sense now. Lights on but nobody home, few bricks shy of a load. "Mad cow!" she says, and giggles, and that's the last thing she remembers until she wakes up in a cave.

And when she does, everything before that is muddy and blurry and mixed-up. Not—back home, that's clear and beautiful, Mama and Daddy and grad school and the library, _home_. But everything here—there was something about jail, and she was sick. Did she escape somehow? Did they think she'd died, throw her in one of the open ditches that serves as a mass grave for her kind?

She can never sort it out, and after a while she stops trying because when she thinks about it too hard she starts remembering—this little monster person—and that never happened. _Can't_ have happened.

********************************************************

 

Lorne gets to the active suck-point of the day and, yes, it's folks from, ha, "home." Oh hooray.

He hangs back a bit, just looking, until he's satisfied himself that he doesn't actually _know_ any of them. Until he's damn sure that none of them is his _mother_. He doesn't even kid himself that it's because he doesn't want family to have gotten sucked into Hell; it's because he doesn't want to _deal_ with any of them.

He walks up to them, takes a deep breath, braces himself to deal with the upcoming flurry of apostrophes, and launches into his hated native tongue. The usual spiel: sorry you got sucked through a portal; you're in a dangerous place, but we have things as under control as possible; yes, those of you with swords and attitudes will have plenty of hacking opportunities available, please go stand over there; those of you who wish to contribute to the community in more peaceful ways line up over _here_; my lovely assistant Brandon will poll you on food needs, give you tokens for meals and set up housing for you, please let him know if any of you are cohabiting—

And one big sword-carrying lug interrupts him with a snarl, points at a knot of Pyleans standing away from the main group. Lorne notices for the first time that those folks are a much lighter shade of green, much more subtly horned—mere nubs, some of those horns; and his stomach clenches because he knows what's about to come out of Lug's mouth.

And sure enough, Lug says, "The _zg'toff_ will not be housed with the rest of us. We require that they have separate slave quarters. I am their overseer; give me their meal tokens and I will see if their behavior warrants feeding."

Lorne says, very calmly, "That's not how it works here, buddy," and Lug blinks at him in confusion, points at the group again and, like Lorne just _isn't getting it_, explains, "ZG'TOFF!"

"What does that mean?" Brandon says. "Because I'm thinking it's not good."

"It's not," Lorne says. "A polite translation would be 'half-breed,'" and wow, he still sounds really calm, which is bizarre because he can feel his pulse beating against the inside of his eardrums. "A less polite translation would be 'cow excrement.' A even _less_ polite translation would be…"

"Gotcha," Brandon says.

"Get a couple of my goons over here," Lorne says, smiling, and Brandon does, and when Lorne's flanked by two—ogres? trolls? whatever, they're HUGE--he walks up to Lug. Grins at him hugely and says in Pylean, "New world order, bucko, and all the orders are _mine_. And my orders _are_, those folks you don't like get the best housing we can find; the rest of your people get _adequate_ rooms. And _you_, honorless one, son of a mother with no _beard_, _you_ give up your sword and join the rest of the extreme low-lifes on the street-cleaning crew. Have fun scrubbing up after the next bio-explosion."

He leaves Lug thrashing around in the goons' grip and screaming that his sword is his honor is his manhood blah blah blah, and walks over to tell the zg'toff that, in Hell, they're going to be a lot better off.

**************************************************************************

 

_Six Pylean years before rescue_

Delivery is the worst pain Fred's ever felt, like getting collar-zapped over and over, every ten minutes, every five, every two. And she's a small person, and she's thinking this baby is maybe the size of, of the _whole stable_. "It's bigger than me! It's just _folded up funny!_" she says, grabbing onto Lara's shoulder. "Shhh," Lara says dully. "Here. Bite a stick."

"What if it's got HORNS?" Fred says, and a contraction hits and she doubles up, squirming on the straw. "Oh Jesus oh CHRIST it's going to rip me OPEN what if it's got HORNS?"

"Hush," Lara says. "They never have big ones, or sharp. Hush."

When it's all the way out and the cord is cut, Lara wraps the little—how can it be _little_?—thing up in a bundle and lays it on Fred's chest. "It's female," she says. "I'll leave you alone for a while," and she gives Fred a long look.

Fred's groggy with Lara's herbs, and hurting, and takes a while to sort out what that look meant, and—oh. She'd heard that the half-breeds often died soon after birth. Maybe a lot of them had _help_.

She looks down at the head, the wet sticky black hair, and remembers the master's hair wet with sweat, his face looming over her, bobbing, rhythmic; and her wrists hurt in his hands and everything hurt and she was trying to recite prime numbers in her head and tell herself she didn't exist below the neck but all the things that didn't exist hurt and distracted her and she just kept thinking one, three, one, three, one…

But that's not fair. Not fair to this little thing, to this little _girl_, and Fred slides the baby up her chest, rolls it over into the curve of her arm a little so she can look at its face. _Her_ face. It has tiny rounded horn nubs, just barely peeking out of the wet hair, and—yeah, it's kinda green.

"Frankenstein," Fred says to her, and the baby gives her a cross look. "I know," Fred says, "Common mistake, that's not the monster, it's the doctor."

She manages to get her tunic undone one-handed. "You don't have fangs or anything, do you?" she says, slips a finger in the baby's mouth and rubs it around the smoothness there. The baby frantically gums down on her finger. "Got your mama's appetite," Fred says, and suddenly feels a huge wave of homesickness, the kind she thought she'd given up on by now, because _her_ mama would _love_ this baby. She probably wouldn't even _notice_ the green—she just loves anybody that loves to _eat_.

Fred starts trying to figure out how to hold the baby for nursing, murmurs, "You're gonna meet her. Because I'm gonna get you _home_."

She gets the baby's mouth around a nipple, touches a finger to the baby's smushed-up nose. Maybe the face will look less—mashed and angry after a while. "I guess the monster didn't have a name," she says. "No-name. Store-brand. Generic." She snorts a giggle and stops abruptly because that makes her pelvic bones feel like they're about to crack open. "Genny," she says, and the baby looks _really_ pissed off, but Fred whispers, "Too bad, kid, it's _you_."

********************************************************************************

 

Lorne starts trying to explain, but the group of ex-slaves is mostly looking with bewilderment at their masters being led away, at their overseer being sat on by a troll.

He talks and talks, and finally he starts seeing a little bit of comprehension, a little bit of hope on some of the faces, and he feels a rush of nostalgia. When he arrived in L.A. it was, ah, better situated, but he remembers full well that dawning of "I never have to go BACK!" And he wonders, suddenly, if any of these people will find the same delights here that he did. If any of them sing.

He tries to get the concept across, finally just breaks into "That Old Black Magic," and one adult says, "Ah!" and points at a small child.

He goes to her and hunkers down next to her, and even though he's guessing people who look just like him have been less than kind to her her whole life, she doesn't flinch, stares him steadily in the face.

"You," he says in Pylean, then sings a few bars, finishes with "too?"

And she sings.

Lorne sits down heavily on the ground, and he's gasping but he's not getting enough air. Not because the reading is hitting him hard, though it is—this girl grown up, fighting beside Angel, fighting with brawn and brain, with swords and with complicated contraptions she'll invent someday.

No, he can't breathe because she's singing "The Yellow Rose of Texas."

She finishes up, and he tries for just a minute to tell himself that Fred taught that to other slaves who taught it to their babies, it's become part of Pylean folklore. But that's bullshit because now that he's looking he can't avoid seeing it—the girl's stockier, sturdier, but otherwise he's looking at a tiny, green, horned Fred. "A little Lornette," he whispers, and she cocks her head at him.

"Sorry, no way to translate _that_," he tells her in Pylean.

He just sits and looks at her for a while, because what is he going to tell Angel, Spike, what's left of Wesley? How did they not know this? They would have gone back, found her, they would have done anything…

"Your poor mama," he says.

He stands back up and reaches out for her hand, and she quietly breaks his heart by giving him a look that's not even a little bit frightened—a resigned and _despairing_ look that should never be on a kid's face. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

He pulls his hand back, waves Brandon over. Brandon is looking a little googly-eyed over the singing thing.

"What the hell?" Brandon says.

"Tell you later," Lorne says. "For right now, can you give this kid a ride on your shoulders?"

Brandon, who really deserves a raise, seems to feel that this is an entirely reasonable addition to his duties, and scoops up the kid. He delegates an under-underling to finish dealing with the other Pyleans, and they start off down the cracked, melted-in-spots sidewalk.

The kid's looking a little more relaxed now that she's in the care of a human; looking around from her tall vantage point, taking everything in. Lorne tries to hang back but he can't resist asking her name.

"Jenny," she says, and he doesn't remember that being a family name but apparently there was a hell of a lot he didn't know about Fred.

"Jenny," he tells her, "I know some nice people who really want to meet you. And you're not going to understand this for a while, and I don't think I want to try to explain it right now anyway, and good God am I ever making sure you don't meet Illyria, and—well, we've definitely got to _relocate_ home, and I'm screwing this up completely, but, trust me, although you've got no _reason_ to right now, I _get_ that, but trust me, you're _home_."

And that was the worst pep talk ever uttered by a sentient creature, so Lorne just starts singing, everything he can think of that sounds vaguely Texan. Brandon, bless him, doesn't ask any questions as they walk down the streets of Hell A with a little demon on his shoulders and Lorne singing "Yellow Rose" and "Streets of Laredo" and "I'm an Old Cowhand" and "Tumbling Tumbleweeds."

And after a while Lorne can't take it anymore, walking three feet away from this little piece of Fred. He keeps singing, reaches out and loops one hand very gently around a small ankle, looks at her face to see if he's scaring her; but she's fallen asleep, drooling into Brandon's hair.

 

\--END--

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Little Green](https://archiveofourown.org/works/784881) by [Dan_Ingram](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dan_Ingram/pseuds/Dan_Ingram)




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